Appendix B. PowerShell Web Access

PowerShell Web Access (PWA) was introduced as part of Windows Server 2012 and enhanced in Windows Server 2012 R2. Strictly speaking, it isn’t part of PowerShell but is a feature of Windows Server that enables you to connect to a PowerShell Remoting endpoint from a web browser. That web browser can be on a Windows device, a non-Windows tablet, on even a smart phone if your eyesight is good enough to deal with the tiny screen. PWA brings mobile remoting to administrators using PowerShell. In this appendix, we’ll give you an overview of setting up PWA and then conclude by working through a script that will set up PWA on a remote machine.

The first thing you need to do is install PWA. The PWA server would normally sit in your organization’s DMZ. Connectivity is supplied to the corporate LAN so that you can create remote connections from the PWA server to machines in your domain. In this first example, we assume that the machine is in the domain.

PWA is a Windows feature and isn’t installed by default. You also need to ensure that IIS, .NET 4.5, and PowerShell 3.0 (Windows Server 2012), 4.0 (Windows Server 2012 R2), or 5.0 (the next version of Windows Server) are installed.

You can use Server Manager to perform the install or better still use PowerShell: